Selected News and Personal Thoughts – by Christian Terboven.

Tag Archives: ISC09

5th International Workshop on OpenMP (IWOMP 2009) in Dresden, Germany. The IWOMP workshop series focuses on the development and usage of OpenMP. This year’s conference is titled Evolving OpenMP in an Age of Extreme Parallelism – I think this phrase is a but funny, but nevertheless one can clearly observe a trend towards Shared-Memory parallelization on the node of even the extremely parallel machines. Attached to the conference is a two day meeting of the OpenMP language committee. The language committee is currently discussing a long list of possible items for a future OpenMP 3.1 or 4.0 specification, including but not limited to my favorites Composability (especially for C++) and Performance on cc-NUMA system. Bronis de Supinski, the recently appointed Chair of the OpenMP Language Committee, will give a talk on the current activities of the LC and how the future of OpenMP might look like – I hope the slides will be made public soon after the talk. Right before the conference there will also be a one day tutorial for all people interested in learning OpenMP (mainly given by Ruud van der Pas – strongly recommended).

High Performance Computing Symposium 2009 (HPCS) in Kingston, Canada. HPCS is a multidisciplinary conference that focuses on research involving High Performance Computing and this year it takes place in Kingston. I’ve never been at that conference series, so I am pretty curious how it will look like. Attached to the conference are a couple of workshops, including Using OpenMP 3.0 for Parallel Programming on Multicore Systems – run again by Ruud van der Pas and us, and Parallel Programming in Visual Studio 2008 on Windows HPC Server 2008 – organized by us as well. Here in Aachen, the interest in our Windows-HPC compute service is still growing fine and thus we have usually around 50 new participants in our bi-yearly training events. The HPCVL people asked explicitly to cover parallel programming on Windows in the OpenMP workshop, so we separated this aspect out without further ado to serve it well. The workshop program can be found here.

International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 2009) in Hamburg, Germany. ISC titles itself as Europe’s premier HPC event – while this is probably true it is of course smaller than the SC events in the US, but usually better organized. Without question you will find numerous interesting exhibits and can listen to several talks (mostly by invited speakers), so please excuse the self-marketing of me pointing to the Jülich Aachen Research Alliance (JARA) booth in the research space where we will show an interactive visualization of large-scale numerical simulation (damage of blood cells by a ventricular device – pretty cool) as well as give an overview of our research activities focused on Shared-Memory parallelization (we will distribute OpenMP syntax references again). If you are interested in HPC software development on Windows, feel invited to stop by at our demo station at the Microsoft booth where we will have many demos regarding HPC Application Development on Windows (Visual Studio, Allinea DDTlite and Vampir are confirmed, maybe more …). And if you are closely monitoring the HPC market, you have probably heard about ScaleMP already, the company aggregating multiple x86 system into a single (virtual) system over InfiniBand – obviously very interesting for Shared-Memory parallelization. If you are interested, you can hear about our experiences with this architecture for HPC.